


In Between

by AmyNChan



Category: Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-14 19:12:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18482605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmyNChan/pseuds/AmyNChan
Summary: Sophie, a month into her stay at the castle, is forced to reassess.





	In Between

It was a wonder that the world surrounding her could be so calm.  It was usually filled to the brim with chaos, erratic movements in her peripheral, actions that needed accomplishing, and messes that needed cleaning.  Everything was so busy that she almost never had a moment to breathe.  Not a second to spare.  No time to think.

For now, though, all seemed still enough.  The fire demon sat on the hearth, slowly burning his way through keeping the castle together.  The boy had gone to sleep hours ago.  The master of the house wouldn’t return tonight.  And her old hands were cold.

Arthritis was a pain.  Her creaking back was a pain.  Her eyesight, miraculous as it was that it had stayed in such good shape, gave her head pain.  There wasn’t a single spot on her body that wasn’t sore or withered, but it wasn’t that which affected her most:  it was the distance.

Yes, distance.  Distance from the life she’d had until so recently.  By now, she would have finished the last hat, murmuring her own blessings upon it before she closed the shop.  By now, she would have double checked the locks, wary, even without experience, of the witches that roamed the town.  By now, she would have whispered her nightly routines, updating her father on the goings on of the shop.  By now, she would have gone to sleep, hoping to become well-rested enough to awaken early the next day to do her work.  To mend hats instead of sweeping floors.  To make a singular meal instead of three.  To weave in and out of needlework and thread instead of mops and suds.

Her life hadn’t been perfect, nor had it been easy.  But it had been comfortable and familiar.  And as strange as some of the women who worked in the shop seemed at times, they had grown to have a sense of familiarity to her.  Her chosen isolation hadn’t been happy, but it had been comfortable.  Her decision to run her father’s shop had been borne out of duty, but also respect for traditions.  This was how her life had always been planned to go.  This was how her life was meant to be.

Until her.  Until him.  Until _them_.

Now her life was filled with shifting houses and spells that could make the finest clothes and not a single clean floor.  Now she constantly shared a space with a harping demon and a boy whose manners matched the house he lived in.  Now her boss came and left with the predictability of something that was certainly not predictable at all.

And the part which kept her up at night was how swiftly she was becoming accustomed to it all.  How the noise and the chaos and the last-minute errands were becoming her new normal.  How distant her old life seemed in comparison to what she now found herself in.  It was true that she wanted her own curse to be broken, she wanted that very much.  However, she wondered if she could ever truly return to the life she had once known.

Too chaotic to live her previous sedimentary life.  Still adjusting to the world of madness she found herself in.  This world of in-between had snuck up on her this night, paralyzing her and forcing her to reassess everything.

Was this really the life she wanted?  Were these people, the ones who were no closer to breaking her curse than she was to breaking theirs, the kind of people she wanted to remain with?  Did she want to put herself in a position that could, quite possibly, keep her from returning to the world she once knew forever?  Simply because the world she resided in now required that she change, at least a little bit, to stay?

Could she be happy with the direction her life had taken?

Old, withered eyelids divided her sight from the dull glow of the main room for a moment.  A shuddering sigh escaped her lips.

This life was chaotic and confusing and took most of her strength to keep up with.  But even having lived there only a month, she couldn’t deny that she’d found a certain strength of her own here.  The strength that had allowed her to stand against the Witch of the Waste often surfaced around Calcifer.  The cheek that she often reserved in front of Lettie was used to tease Markel.  The stubbornness that had kept her in place at her beloved father’s shop now kept her amused and sane in the face of that ever-elusive Howl.

To Sophie, it felt as though the curse prevented her from looking to the future.  With it, she didn’t know how much longer she would have to live in this old body.  With it, she wasn’t certain if she could ever go back to the place she knew and loved before.  With it, she found herself in this strange and confusing place of continual change.  A place she couldn’t quite bring herself to call ‘bad’.

Living with Calcifer and Markel and Howl wasn’t a bad thing.  Nor did it seem like a wholly good thing yet.  But the only thing she could say for certain was that her happening upon the door of the castle on her search for a cure had sparked a bit of a revolution within her.  Her lifestyle had changed so drastically that it seemed fitting that her views would shift over time as well.  The revolution seemed to settle her thoughts for a moment.

Change, at least in Howl’s castle, seemed inevitable.  Somehow, the notion soothed her stirring thoughts.  At least enough to sleep.

Wordlessly, the woman felt herself relax and drift off.  She still couldn’t yet tell where she would go from here: if she would ever return to her father’s hat shop or if she would stay here or if she would go somewhere else entirely.  However, this world of in-between was a fine place to be for now.  It was a place she could find herself adapting to.

It was a place that she already had.

**Author's Note:**

> another old work that I never got around to publishing. yaaaaay. X'D I actually wrote this while I was half-asleep, so I was expecting it to be bad. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that it's not. XD


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